Event Information

About the Program

One has to be present with the collection at Dia:Beacon to truly grasp its intention. This tour will approach the collection on view at Dia:Beacon in terms of the body’s relationship to the materiality of art and the volume of space.

Images found online or in books do not do justice to the sensory involvement of artists like Richard Serra and Fred Sandback. The size, scale, and measured relationship of the object to your body is a part of Donald Judd’s art; your proximity to its construction is vital to understanding the specificity of its form. These indicators have a grand metaphor attached: reality is a product of your senses and experience. The galleries at Dia:Beacon evoke awareness of perspective because of their intentional simplicity. This crossroads of our nature encountering the alterity of the galleries is explored with subtlety and grace in the light filled halls of the repurposed Nabisco box printing factory. How does the information about the work change if you are up-close, far away, if you move quickly, or slowly? Can you smell the materials, is there lightness or a weight that you sense when standing next to them?

Perspective is both a mental outlook and a tool in the production of art. This tour will explore the collection at Dia:Beacon from multiple vantage points both literally and figuratively through artworks by Walter De Maria, Richard Serra, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, Sol Le Witt, and Andy Warhol.

About the guide

Crichton Atkinson is a performance and video artist. In the last year she was included in the all female exhibition Crush the Serpent at The Tea Factory in Bushwick, NY and N2NM: Exchange in Santa Fe, NM. She is the Founder and Co-Director at Nothing Space, an alternative arts space in Bushwick, where she has curated De-Script, Shadow Sign: Dance/Performance, Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground, and Sketches: Propositions and Potentials. She is also currently a docent at Dia:Beacon and the New Museum, where she participated as a performance artist in Spartacus Chetwynd: Home Made Tasers; Bona Park's The box in the plastic bag (la boîte-en-sac plastique) New York version (2012) ; and Positions: An Action by Public Movement, which was part of Performa11. Between 2006-2010, she served as both director and assistant director in the multi-media theater company Dangerous Ground Productions. Funded in part by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Dangerous Ground presented shows at HERE and The Under the Radar Festival, produced by The Public Theater.